Tourisms’ Tristes TropiquesI: Literary Travels

Abstract

Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques draws attention to this tropical zone where the full scale and scope of tourism and its associated challenges and consequences are rapidly becoming materially manifest. Tristes Tropiques refers to the title of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous work. That he wrote about the “sad tropics” in a memoir-travelogue is significant. Through a literary and reflexive engagement, he draws our attention to the important place literature, in its many forms, has in the anthropology of tourism and critical tourism studies. Travel literature, rather than being merely fictional, often presents the crude reality of tourism in the tropics and is essential to tourism studies. This first collection of papers (in a two-part special issue) entitled Tourisms’ Tristes Tropiques I: Literary Travels, addresses the importance of travel literatures of and from the tropics. It presents works from the Pacific, Indonesia, Sarawak on Borneo, Cambodia, Asia, Hawai’i, Africa, and the Caribbean. Genres include poetry, dystopian futures, travelogues, travel novels, and a history of tourism.